Throughout
the world, societies are split into distinct, albeit sometimes overlapping,
social groups.

While
self-definition - and self-defined belonging to groups - widely varies
over time and situations for even the same individual, there are several
indicators and features along which the researcher can build clusters
of people.

Indeed,
the atomistic idea according to which everyone feels to be dissimilar
from anybody else is a realistic picture only of very extreme social conditions.
Networks of
people linked by communication and emotional lines are very common, while
their collapse into monistic units of disconnected individuals is more
the result of crashes in the social texture than the standard state.

This
is very important for economics since, for instance, social groups are
important for consumption as visible behaviour
can become a standard with which to compare your owns. Peer groups are
often the reference for choosing whether a certain good is a "must
have", engendering an imitation dynamics.

In
this vein, another name for "social group" is "market
segment", seen from the point of view of a seller or a mass medium,
to which a differentiated product can be addressed.

Social
groups defined along income and non-income axes

A
basic axis of social differentiation is personal income. A three-category
distinction among the poor, the middle class and the rich, as the one
we proposed here, can be too
rough to capture all the intermediate nuances but still help characterize
different societies.

The
unit of analysis can be - but not need to be only - the individual. A
second element should be kept into account when judging the individual's
position: the size and composition of the household to which he
or she belongs. Larger families pay less per-person for certain shared
expenditure (like housing) and they can have more than one income-bearer.
If not, a large family with only one income-bearer would be much poorer
than a one-component family.

A third
consideration is linked to the stability of income over time, with
people having larger fluctuations in income belonging to different social
groups than people reaching systematically and without renegotiation similar
levels of income.

Another
crucial axis of social differentiation is the ownership of assets.
Families that own their home - having already paid back any financial
instruments to buy it - can devote more money to active savings and consumption
than families with the same level of income but that have to pay the rent.
The ownership of durable goods is an important status element aiding different
aspects of life. Financial assets (as Treasury bonds, shares, controlling
majorities in firms,...) can constitute elements of common material interests
for certain social groups.

Employment
is an extremely important element in defining identities and common interests,
common languages and values. Equally important are culture and
levels of education.

Core
vs. periphery

Economists
often ignore many of those axes and are tempted to treat each of them
as uncorrelated to the others.

But
sociology has convincingly shown that these axes tend to covariate, so
that rich people tend to be more educated, to have top jobs, to participate
more to social life and decision-making.

Thus one should distinguish
a core of society (people with more than certain thresholds of
income, education, ... and strong connections through social communication
channels) - which actively takes part to public life - in contrast to
social periphery, a more or less marginal layer of people (poor,
emarginated, isolated)[1].

Social
cohesion is what keep society united, avoiding the polarization of
core vs. periphery. To measure social cohesion, one should look at how
deep is the gap between the so-called "have's" and "have
not's" (as in the case of "digital divide", the access
to clean water, or the softer concept of "employability") and
how fast is this gap filled through a diffusion dynamics.

Electoral
participation is much higher in the core than in the periphery. This
explains - in part - why, even in quite polarized society, democratic
election can be won by parties making the interests of the small minority
of rich.

More
in general, social groups may shift to support the same party or policy
option as a block, with politicians trying to involve influencial members
of the social group into their campaigns and apparatus to reach out to
the overall social group. They may develop a specific language and key
words decoded by the members as attractive, including derogative references
to opposed social groups.

Electoral
pyramids of people in connection voting as a block are immersed in a sea
of un-connected or pluri-connected people who vote independently or unconsistently.
Political tactics can leverage on pyramids or be conducted through direct
appeal to voters.

Groups
can be defined as people doing the same thing, liking the same
subjects, sharing the same opinions, aiming at the same goals,
using the same line of reasoning and behavioural routines.
More technically, groups have common interests, share real experience,
express similar way of thinking and reacting.

In
a further dimension, one can look at social groups as connected networks
of people. They actively exchange information and Weltanschauungen.
In the presence of new events, they consult each other on the interpretation
to give to them and to decide what to do.

Solidarity
networks
link families, relatives, friends, neighbours up to co-citizens and people
even if not previously known.

One
can have a strong consciousness of belonging to a certain group, who has
specific material and non-material common interests as well as characteristic
way of developing strategies, organizing and acting. But this is not always
the case, since it is the result of personal, generational, collective
experience.

Usually,
the researcher takes existing groups and then look at how they react to
events and issues. But one can take the other way round and look how social
identities arise from conflict and confrontation with "strangers".
It's when you are under attack from "somebody" that you look
at possible helpers - people on the same part of the barricades. This
happens for instance when a state policy is hurting a social group. A
recognized leadership and an organizational hierarchy help
a lot in transforming a latent identity into a co-ordinated multi-agent
force.

In
more "peaceful" situations, an individual may belong to more
than one group and the axis - along which he feels to be defined - can
be changed by mass media pressure as well as by specific events.

In
a macro-perspective, "totalizing identities" as ethnicity, language,
religion can reduce the subjective importance of other social boundaries.

In
a micro-perspective, the consciousness of collective identity can arise
from current participation to social activities and events, especially
when they have a characteristic mass dimension: large factories,
manifestations, church rites, stadiums, music concerts.

On the identification
of the “middle class” (Sept. 2011)
Income polarization should leave room to a much stronger and wider middle
class. But what is "middle class" nowadays? This paper explores theoretical
and practical definitions that can be the sound base for new policies.

NOTES

[1] A
similar situation is found among nations, as explained in
this paper where we provided a more formal definition of "core",
"periphery", and "semiperiphery".